


neither a dreamer nor a dream

by kiiouex



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Introspection, something like that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-05
Updated: 2018-02-05
Packaged: 2019-03-14 00:42:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13582395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: Matthew calls at three in the morning, to talk about mom.





	neither a dreamer nor a dream

**Author's Note:**

> This is still kind of a messy thought-dump but I've been plinking at it long enough, I'm ready to ship it out into the world. 
> 
> Huge thanks to [the world's best beta](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid), as always

Matthew calls at three in the morning, to talk about mom.

You answer, knowing Ronan won't, knowing Matthew just needs someone to listen while he snuffles and meanders through a very long string of memories that all culminate in 'I miss her'. He won't be able to sleep, otherwise. You haven’t been sleeping either, but you'd been about to, maybe, before the phone call.

He starts “Declan..?” so sad and small that there is no option.

You scrub a hand over your forehead. It’s been too hot to sleep, but that doesn’t stop you from longing. Should have taken your pills an hour ago, but then you’d have missed this, and even if it is sometimes tempting, you can never withhold comfort from Matthew. You say, “Yeah?” and “No, it’s okay,” and, “Go ahead.”

Your elbows dig in to your knees as you sit on the edge of your bed, your baby brother's voice torn and uneven in your ear. You should’ve known you were about due for this. Every two months for the last year, Matthew has called at three in the morning, to talk about mom.

He asked you to keep it a secret from Ronan. What’s one more, you suppose.

The catalyst for tonight’s call is apparently an old family friend – one of only two friends that you’re aware either of your parents had. “She said I looked just like mom,” Matthew says, and his voice is hushed and rasping like he thinks his roommate has the faintest chance of sleeping through this. “Except, you know, for not being pretty.”  

“You’re the spit of her,” you tell him. “And you don’t want to be pretty.”

He says, “Ha,” and then something else about the way she dressed, but you’d rather offer platitudes than engage. This isn’t a topic you’re comfortable with. There probably isn’t a polite way to tell someone you wish they had less of a resemblance. Matthew’s eyes are Aurora’s, and his hair, and his aura, and you’d like nothing more than for him to be his own person. Ronan is looking less and less like your father every day, because he’s wearing his cruelty on the surface and not underneath. You look like your father too, but only as far as 'I see the resemblance', not 'you must be Niall's son.' You think the difference is in the shoulders.

It’s always Aurora with Matthew, never Niall, which is the only way these calls are tolerable. Your father is a bastard; hating him is the easiest thing in the world. But your mother is complicated. You know her in a way that Matthew and Ronan don’t, and in a way they don’t want to hear. Their radiant mother can do no wrong; quietly, for a long time, you have suspected that she is _their_ mother, not yours.

You think that if your father made Aurora perfect, then she couldn’t have had any child but Ronan. You doubt she could have had a child who wasn’t magical. You doubt she could have even have had a _daughter_ , from what you know of Niall. But she made Ronan, the heir, and he made Matthew, the cherub, and you think it might have been some distant, fallible, mortal woman that made you.

You did actually ask her, once, point blank if she was your mother. She hadn’t known what to say. The two of you stood in the kitchen, and the question hung, and the moment ticked past. Too late, she said, “Of course I am sweetie,” and smiled (her perfect teeth were too bright), and she offered you lemonade (homemade, fresh-pressed, sweet enough for Matthew which was always too sweet for you).

It wasn’t that unusual. Sometimes she used to look at you for too long without saying anything, and sometimes all she could offer were the most generic platitudes. You think your knowing about her just made her _wrong_ , stopped her from being a person around you. And if you’d ever hoped it was an insular, Lynch-family quirk, she’d worked on _Gansey_ the first time he’d come over, and it had prickled something black and queasy in your soul.

You don’t know what’s so different about Ronan that let him get it right, but you will never stop being grateful that Matthew doesn’t _break_.

Matthew called to talk about 'mom', his mom, never quite yours. It's nothing you haven't heard before. It's nothing you haven't lived through yourself. Pies and lemonade and berries, the afternoons when she'd help him build a fort, how she'd sit up with them some nights, when the hole Niall left was deeper than others, telling them stories of her husband's adventure with the promise of his return. 

He talks and talks and your thoughts drift, and the more he mentions the way Aurora doted on him and Ronan, the more it stings, in a faint way that you do not acknowledge, that so few of these anecdotes include you.

These days your relationship with Ronan is nothing more that meeting him at church, and soon you will move to Washington and you're going to have to make the two hour drive that ensures your relationship will be as much as seeing him at church. You get to sit in a pew, shoulder to shoulder, while he tries to sound rude and act tough and stares at the altar and aches and aches and prays. You sit beside him and try to remember belief. 

God was ingrained in you so young you don't think you'll ever really let him go, but there are nights when you think He and your father cannot exist in the same world. For a while as a child you'd misunderstood immaculate conception, and you'd thought, in much the same way Ronan thought, that Matthew must be holy. And then you'd tried to argue that in class, your parents were called in, and even though Aurora was the one to go, gentle patience and smoothness, she must have told Niall anyway because you'd learned your lesson with a stinging cheek and pricking eyes. 

Belief feels very far away most nights. It feels like some kind of joke that your brother whispers to the divine when he is the closest thing to it, and it feels like the cruellest trick in the world that the Father isn't there for you either. Some nights you pray anyway, on the off-chance; some nights you look up at the sky and you think you see God's black bones in the gaps between the stars. 

Half past three and Matthew runs out of words about mom. He has tired himself out with grief, and you bid him a gentle goodnight and remind him to hang up the phone before he starts snoring. When the connection ends, you feel very alone, and thoughts of home take up too much space in the room beside you.

Your pills wait on your bedside table. It’s probably too late to take them now if you want to wake up fresh for your young republican meeting. They’re a necessity to knock you out cold; you avoid dreaming the way Ronan avoids phones, and for largely the same reason. Maybe your only common interest.

Sleep is out. You think of working, or reading, or drinking, and then you think about going home. Matthew’s memories of the Barns are crowding you, and you have not seen Aurora since the day you left home, not since your father died and she wound down through silence to stillness to sleep. You are not allowed to be there.

You can’t imagine how anyone would ever find out.

It is a twenty minute drive and you make it in silence, sleep a distant, impossible thing left on the nightstand in your dorm room. Your Porsche hums a little, sleek and sharp and ridiculous, totally ridiculous. You had to buy your own car after Ronan took the BMW and you didn't want the BMW anyway, you honestly didn't, and you know you spent too much on the Porsche but it's your own attempt at a 'fuck you', never quite as toothy as your brother's.

You have never wanted to go home before. You know it is an insect under Ronan’s skin, the longing, but that’s because he sees the rest of the world as inferior. Someday, you think it might be nice to have a place you love as much. You content yourself with more attainable things.

You park on the gravel on the front drive, and when you get out, the strange and hollow sense of the uninhabited Barns surrounds you. The night is never real out on your father’s property. You can tell the dream trees from the real ones, as the real ones are overflowing with spoiled fruit, the sweet rot of it covering their roots. The dreams trees are unchanged.

The Barns is Niall's place full of Niall's things and the fact that it falls to Ronan doesn't really change that, because nothing is more Niall's thing than Ronan. And the fact that the property falls to Ronan, and not the eldest son, is at once a relief, and understandable, and a stinging burn at the back of your throat because Niall has never once even  _tried_  to pretend that he might care for you equally.

Sometimes you don’t understand how Ronan never noticed your father’s myths and dreams and lies, the blood you spent your adolescence mopping up. You suppose he had no reason to look. Gansey thinks he knows how much Ronan has changed, but he's only barely scratching the surface. This was a kingdom, and he was a prince, and you were the same thing you are now, unwanted.

Ronan thinks you're a bastard now, but you could say worse things to him, if you cared less. If you didn't care for him at all, you would spit the truth of his father out, grind his face into all the blood and muck and ugly fucking truths that his life was built on top of and that he gets to choose not to see. 

Instead you don't pretend to love Niall, and that's all Ronan needs to hate you.

You let yourself in through the back door, the way you suspect Ronan lets himself in whenever he feels that seeing his old bedroom might be worth destroying all your futures. There is only one light on, and you feel like a moth as you follow it, foolish and about to hurt.  

Your mother is sleeping. A queen in repose, her chest moves and her eyelids flutter, and she drifts out of time. She is exactly as she was the last time you saw her, and something of the wrongness of that finally affirms it. She is not your mother.

By blood, you’re not certain, but by spirit, never never never. You are a Lynch in name only. You are the necessary non-believer made to keep the corporeal ticking around the dreamers with greater concerns, you are your father’s failed first attempt at an heir, you are no one’s favourite.

You think that if your father made Aurora perfect, then she couldn’t have had you.

You sit in another chair in that same room, and the house is as foreign as when you lived in it. Aurora’s fingers lie limp on the chair’s arms, and the light means all you can see out the window is a reflection of her radiant blonde hair. Maybe you shouldn’t blame your brothers for wanting her to wake up; maybe if you’d had a fairy, a queen, a goddess to cherish you, you would still be fighting the way they fight.

But she lived to please people and you were, apparently, unpleasable. She _broke_ when she was alone with you. You hate her, and you loathe Niall, and you despise both your brothers for buying into such a stupid dream. Aurora can live in Matthew’s memories, Niall can live in Ronan’s, and you can put them both behind you and stop being defined by what you aren’t.

You don’t know why you wanted to come back. All at once you can’t stand it, sitting in your father’s fabricated house with the woman he had to make for himself, his Galatea. You get yourself out of the house, but there is a live wire in your veins, the air is still dew-sweet and dreamy, and you’re sick with it. You thought he wouldn’t be able to make you feel like this anymore. You are alive with loathing for him, for what he did to you and your brothers who despite everything, everything, you will still love.

It is four in the morning, and you call Ronan.

He answers.

It seems that neither of you expected Ronan to answer, because he says, “Declan?” like he’s surprised to be talking to you, and you say, “Ronan,” and stop there because you never thought you’d get this far. Somewhere in the distance behind Ronan you can hear a car tearing along a road, and you imagine that car continuing on and on until it passes Singer’s Falls and you can hear it too.

The night is letting you breathe. The world feels small. You know Ronan is out, insomniac, that he’s probably going to skip school tomorrow, and you just don’t have it in you to _care_. You ask, “Where are you?” as a question, not a demand, and it bothers you just how different it is to be talking to Ronan like a human.

He pauses, but he tells you, “Corner of main. Getting juice from the gas station. How about you?”

You can’t say, ‘home’ so you say, “Out,” and then you tell him about Matthew’s call. Some secrets are not worth keeping, and maybe now Ronan knows he can tell Matthew some of the things he remembers, the nice things, the memories you don’t really have. You can’t remember the last time you talked to him without fighting, possibly because it’s never happened. Your head aches.

He talks to you for a little while, aimless nothings, some movie he and Gansey saw, and you hear the exhaustion in his voice and a part of you that cannot be shut off still hurts for him. You tell him something dull about your internship. He goes ‘huh’. It is the most civil the two of you have ever been. Not being face to face must help.

It gets too close to dawn and you have a meeting in the morning and a twenty minute ride home. You tell him, “Try to get some sleep,” and he says, “Nn,” and then adds, “You too,” and hangs up, presumably before he says anything that could be interpreted as concern. Tomorrow you will be back to blows, you’re sure.

You put your phone away, and for a moment you feel disconnected from the world. The house you grew up in sits silently behind you, and just for your own sake, you wish you could let go of the gnarl of hate and misery the sight of it inspires in you.

You’re glad Ronan is getting the house. You’re glad Matthew isn’t fucked up. You settle yourself back behind the Porsche’s wheel and breathe deep, insomnia beginning to pulse around the edges of your eyes. You don’t know if you’re glad about your father. Some days you think you might be, and some days you think that’s too monstrous, even for what he made of you. 

When you allow yourself to think about it, this is the answer that you find: you did not have a mother or a father. Your brothers are orphans, but you are a creature that grew on its own, strong-shouldered, self-sufficient, so tired you feel your heartbeat in your temples, a wicked pulse every time you close your eyes.

You are so incredibly lonely.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed whatever this was! [Traditional tumblr link](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/)


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